Extending Email Marketing to Facebook

by Alex Eisenhart

A Case Study by Driftrock

Whilst we at Driftrock understand and love Facebook’s custom- and lookalike audiences features, many marketers are still woefully unaware of the hidden potential lurking in their customer email lists. Extending email campaigns to Facebook by serving ads to your mailing list allows retailers to reach and engage a phenomenally high percentage of the customer base.

We worked with premium online menswear brand, Spoke, to demonstrate the value of extending your CRM to Facebook. Spoke is a new breed of menswear using ecommerce to build a better brand. Carving out a sweet spot between Ready-to-Wear and ‘Bespoke’, their clothes are cut in more sizes and are finished to order for a flawless fitting product. Being an ecommerce only business, Facebook has played an integral role for their customer acquisition and customer lifecycle marketing.

Our science journal styled summary of the study:

Background

In email marketing, which is seen as an incredibly effective and essential part of any company’s marketing strategy, open rates of 25% are considered to be very strong. We were convinced that we could deliver better results by extending an email marketing campaign to Facebook.

Facebook’s ‘custom audiences’ feature offers an anonymous, privacy-safe way to upload your mailing list to Facebook. This list (or ‘custom audience’) can then be specifically targeted with Facebook ads.

By combining CRM data and Facebook campaigns, we aimed to show the minimum added benefit of extending a marketing campaign to Facebook, to highlight that extending email marketing campaigns to Facebook should be a standard facet of any company’s marketing strategy.

Methods

The client’s email list was made up of 28,900 people. These 28,900 people were sent an email, which was opened by 23.6% of subscribers.

Facebook ads with a similar creative to that of the email were published on Facebook. These adverts also targeted the mailing list. Using Driftrock’s dynamic audiences tool, we were able to ensure that anyone who opened an email wouldn’t see a Facebook ad.

Results

When including the Facebook campaign, 73% of subscribers were reached overall. Not only were these customers reached, a healthy 1:17.5 ROAS was achieved on Facebook, showing that including Facebook in email marketing campaigns is profitable.

The Conclusion

As we can see from the results of our test, a large proportion of a company’s customer base consistently ignore email marketing. This doesn’t mean that these customers are less valuable to the business, it simply means that they do not engage readily with emails. However, it is very likely that these customers do hang out on Facebook, and are responsive to ad content there.

Our results from this study with Spoke represent a minimum extra potential of extending CRM strategies to Facebook. For the sake of the test, we didn’t target users who had opened the email campaign. In reality, targeting users who also opened the email campaign will most likely have a positive impact on their propensity to purchase.

More Info

The mailing list presents companies with further untapped potential. Custom audiences can be used to create ‘lookalike audiences’ on Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms use thousands of data points to find customers similar to your customers, making this feature by far the most powerful prospective targeting option. Customer segments of the highest lifetime value can fuel powerful customer acquisition strategies, again driving the growth of the mailing list.

With Driftrock’s audience syncing, custom audiences become dynamic audiences. Dynamic audiences facilitate customer lifecycle marketing and the acquisition of quality customers, allowing you to scale your customer base and find new valuable customers. The more that you do this, the more data you have to fuel your strategy and so on and so forth…it really is a virtuous circle!

To find out more on how Driftrock can help you make the most of your customer data, get in touch with us here